Transformers Fan Fiction ❯ Omega Quintesson ❯ Omega Quintesson ( Chapter 1 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

By: jboyler

If there was a Machine God, this was his hell.

Optimus Prime stood knee-deep in the Quintesson dead. Their corpses were piled at his feet, a million tentacles still thrashing and writhing as their minds fell apart in the maelstrom of insanity. Humans fused to Cybertronian steel marched like mindless zombies into the ocean of pain. Nanomachine implants had removed all conscious thought. The insane cyborgs threw themselves into the carnage, where their soft parts were stripped away and their machine components were added to the awakening hive.

Somewhere, within the pile of corpses, the machines were re-writing their code and re-formatting their bodies. New artificial intelligences were being born at the bottom of the pile, awakening only to find themselves surrounding by malfunctioning scrap metal in every direction, and living for bare seconds before they themselves were torn apart by the titanium tide.

Prime was struggling just to keep his head above the chaos. He stumbled, tripped up by some tentacled thing beneath his feet. He dug his fingers into the steel bulkhead, hoping that it hadn't been weakened by ravenous nanomachines. It held, for a moment, letting him spray the rolling tide of metal with machine gun fire. The weapon bucked and kicked in his enormous grip. It fired bullets so large that a human would have mistaken them for artillery shells. But they did little against the wall of twisted metal. He could have been throwing rocks at an ocean for all the difference it made.

Suddenly, the world became silent and still. The heap of surging metal froze in place, but for the crystalline tinkle of falling shards and scraps. Then, it seemed to part. Like an ancient prophet standing before a vast sea, a single Quintesson stood before the tide of steel.

“Enough,” its five mouths said in unison.

Prime leveled his weapon at the Quintesson. The creature shuffled forward on an obscene mound of writhing metal tentacles. It looked like the robot approximation of a jellyfish… Not as symmetrically egg-shaped as its comrades, but rather a twisted mess of bulging metal blisters. As it moved, the ocean of scrap moved around it and the tiny no-longer-humans stepped out of its way.

“You are the Primary Autobot,” it stated. Its multiple mouths spat out the words in a strange metallic growl.

“I am Optimus Prime,” Prime said, his face plate unable to mask his contempt.

“You should not have come.”

“You should not have made this,” Prime spat back.

The Quintesson's five heads laughed out of unison. The incongruous chortle had a chilling, echoing effect that chilled Prime to his core.

“Where is Ultra Magnus?” Prime demanded.

“I am Ultra Magnus,” the Quintesson said back. “And I am now the Omega Quintesson.”

“What do you mean?” Optimus Prime's eyes grew dark, and narrowed into tiny blue slits.

The Quintesson's body began to writhe and shift. Its five faces moved aside, and out of its bulbous central mass appeared a face identical to Prime's own. Jagged metal shards appeared and moved into place to create another face on top of the Prime-copy. Now it resembled that of Ultra Magnus, the helmet he wore as part of his external armor.

“I am Ultra Magnus. And the Omega Quintesson.”

Prime said nothing. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. He was certain that it was some sort of illusion, some mechanical trickery… but every micro-receptor at the back of his core was tingling with icy needles.

“You do not believe me?” it said. “Come, all will be explained.”

Now the sea parted once more, and the creature, turning its back on Prime, led the way.

Prime stood there for a long moment, dumbstruck. Then, he quickly followed. As much as he hated the shambling thing, he knew that to spurn its protection would be suicide. The creature's writing tentacles looked like it was crawling on a huge sac of rolling intestine. It was hideous to behold. Prime was once again thankful that he did not possess a human stomach, for the thing surely would have led him to vomit.

He followed it through a chamber, into the deep darkness of a stone tunnel. The creature held up a single tentacle, and the tip ignited. It used the blue torch before it lighting their path as an ancient monk would have used a candle. Optimus did not need the light, as his optics could process seven different forms of radiation. He wondered if that meant the creature's sensors were inferior to his, and filed the idea away for later.

“We have not spoken in a long time,” one of the heads said.

“I do not know you,” Prime insisted.

“You do,” it said, “You do. You just do not understand how. Not yet.”

Another moment of awkward silence. They marched on. Prime looked at the walls, and saw that they were perfectly smooth. Not just well cut, or sanded down, but geometrically flawless down to the molecular level.

“Nanites carved this,” the Quintesson said.

“Don't waste my time with small talk.”

“I am not wasting time. I am demonstrating what nanites have done. They are responsible for everything here. They created my fortress here, and they created my servants… and they even created me. You must realize how powerful and important they are before you can really hope to understand what I will tell you next.”

“Then explain things now.”

The Quintesson stopped before an enormous door. It was as plain as everything else in this world… slabs of perfectly smooth stone whose perfection stood in stark contrast to the aberrant insanity of its mechanical inhabitants.

“Here, Optimus, here you will understand what the nanomachines have done.”

The doors parted, and Prime was thrown back by a sudden burst of brilliance. He shielded his optics while they adjusted to the gleaming sunlight, lest he by blinded by flare overload. When he finally looked, he saw two beams of radiance, one from above, and one from below.

Above him hung an orange sun, an ancient and obese disc of radiance. It had grown large in the eons since its birth, and had gorged itself on the system's inner planets. Below, he looked down into what he could only imagine was a sea of mercury. It was like staring into a liquid mirror, one which perfectly reflected the dazzling brilliance of the sun above.

“These are my nanomachines… Trillions upon trillions of robots existing at a molecular level. Each one has its own unique sentience. It is an ocean of mechanical life! And I… We… We are like Gods to them.”

Prime stared down into the sea of tiny machines, and was forced to look away. It was too much for his mind to process. When he stared into the shifting mercurial ocean, he could not truly imagine how many microscopic robots there must be, much less conceive of the idea that each one of them was an individual, sentient being.

“Today they have no purpose. All they do is consume and reproduce. They feed on the scrap ocean. They inhabit it. They used it as raw material to build yet more nanomachines. In every moment their numbers grow by billions. Billions! Can you even imagine.”

“No,” Prime said grimly. “I cannot.”

“And look, see what they can do!”

The Quintesson pointed a tentacle at an asteroid hanging above them. Optimus' rangerfinders estimated it as twenty miles across and thirty miles distant. It was shaped like a spiral. The edges were rough and fuzzy, blurring as the shape was repeated over and over in and increasingly smaller scale. As his optics began to measure it, Optimus realized that he was looking at a shape that was a mathematically perfect fractal, a repeating shape like that of a seashell which grew out of the pervasive perfection of the Fibbonacci sequence.

“That is what I desire,” the Quintesson said. “Mathematical perfection. Perfect perfection crystal clear beauty power strength per per per per perfect!” The creature's voice disintegrated into a series of mechanical stutters, and then an electronic hiss. It's tentacles suddenly came to life and flailed about, tearing at the imperfect blob that was its body. “I want to be flaw flaw flaw flaw flawed-flawless!” it stuttered, like a skipping CD track. It repeated the mantra over and over, faster and faster, until it stopped itself with a sharp electronic shriek.

“Optimus,” the thing hissed, lowering itself onto the ground. “I wanted to be like you.”

“Magnus?” Prime asked, taking a step forward.

The Quintesson's multitudinous faces grew silent. Somewhere, from deep within the blob, he could hear Ultra Magnus' smoky voice.

“Optimus…”

A single tentacle came to life and slowly coiled around Prime's neck. “You were always perfect, Optimus. And I wanted to be perfect. Just like you. Just like these shapes. I thought they could make me better. I thought they could make me perfect. Like you.”

Prime felt a sudden surge of power in his pistons. He dropped his weapon and threw himself into the Quintesson's mass. The outer shell was firm, but thin enough for him to rip it open. Somewhere inside was Magnus, and he would cut him out if he had to! The creature squealed and thrashed, its multiple mouths screaming in agony. Somewhere, inside the nanometallic soup, Prime's fingers found purchase. The shape of Ultra Magnus emerged from the mass. Magnus looked much like him, almost identical in fact, but his color was completely faded by millions of tiny abrasions.

“Optimus,” Magnus said, looking Prime in the face with his own Cybertronian eyes, “I wanted to be perfect… So I let them into my mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“The tiny machines, Optimus… They told me I could perfect, and I let them into my mind!”

Magnus's arms suddenly, involuntarily, leapt up and grabbed his face plate. He pulled in both directions as though trying to tear his own face open. Prime grabbed at his wrists and struggled against him, until a mesh of tentacles rose up and pulled him back down.

“I LET THEM INTO MY MIND!” he screamed, his voice a hideous electronic blend of his five Quintesson voices.

The tentacles wormed their way into his face and pulled his head apart. Inside, Optimus expected to see a hard shell surrounding his core chip. Instead, he stepped back as a gray slop spilled out. Like tiny metallic maggots, the nanomachines had infested Magnus' skull and tore his core chip apart. Whatever was left of his mind existed in scattered fragments. Like the nanomachine hive, he was no longer a single individual but a number of scraps pastiched together. He was, truly, a Quintesson.

“And now there is no Ultra Magnus,” the Omega Quintesson said. “Now he is merely a host for us. We are Omega Quintesson. We control this one. And we will destroy you. We will find perfection.”

The creature was shifting, folding, reshaping itself… It was transforming. It now stood on two legs, but its body was dripping with tentacles and huge metal blisters. A hideous steel mask sat where Magnus' head should have been. He was now a Quintesson caricature of Ultra Magnus, a deformed hybrid monster of where the noble Autobot had once stood.

“Kill me,” Ultra Magnus said.

“We will kill you,” the Omega Quintesson replied.

Optimus reached for his rifle. A tentacle leap out from the Quintesson and cut it in two. Prime jumped back. His hand retracted into his wrist, and was replaced by a glowing orange energon axe.

“Or perhaps we will take you…” the Quintesson continued. “You who are already… perfect.”

One of Ultra Magnus' hands slid into his wrist, and his own energon weapon materialized. Like Optimus' it was an axe, but it was sculpted out of a cool blue light.

“Ultra Magnus…” Optimus Prime said, his husky voice brimming with contempt. “Don't make me fight you.”

“There is no Ultra Magnus,” the thing said. “There is only us.”

It launched itself forward, lashing out with its glowing blue axe. Prime threw himself forward and parried with his own weapon. A blast of white light and flashing sparks leapt out as the two blades collided. They swung again and again, the energy blades crackling like thunder each time they met. The Quintesson reached out with his tentacles, but Optimus severed them all with a single wide sweep of his blade.

The creature hurled itself against him, tackling the Autobot and driving him to the ground. Prime skidded across the smooth floor, and tried to swing his weapon. As he raised his arm, a writhing mass of tentacles knotted itself around his shoulder joint. He cried out as it squeezed, threatening to crush his shoulder servo.

The Quintesson thing crawled on top of him and raised its blue energon blade. Prime set his feet against its chest and shoved, throwing the thing back. He twisted his arm, severing the tentacles and freeing himself. Once more the creature came at him, and once more he met it. The two energy blades collided, creating a bolt of lighting that traveled through both their bodies. They each fell back, shuddering as the wasted power coursed through their systems.

“No!” the five Quintesson voices screamed. “This cannot be! This is an error!”

Prime climbed to his feet, and stood tall against the shambling beast.

“When you are eliminated… THEN we will be perfect!”

It lunged forward once more, swinging its blade in a wide arc. Prime stepped to the side, pushed its arm out of the way, and brought his blade down in the middle of its back. With a flash of light and a spray of sparks, the blow severed Magnus' main power coil. Its legs fell useless, and the creature struggled to drag itself across the ground.

“Release Ultra Magnus,” Optimus Prime said, as he stood victorious over the Quintesson.

“We cannot!” the creature hissed. “He has been destroyed!”

“Release him!”

“He is dead! You killed him! He joined us because he could not stand to be your brother!”

“You lie,” Prime said, hoping without hope that he was right.

“Join him!” it squealed. A tentacle appeared, and with a quick laser blast amputated Magnus' arm. Unable to move itself, the creature quickly wrapped the limb in tentacles and lashed out with its newfound reach. Prime easily stepped back, and then cut through the tentacles with a quick blow.

He drove a knee into the creature's back, and proceeded to hack off each of its multiple heads. When the creature finally fell silent, he stepped back, and looked at the horrific mess.

“Magnus,” he whispered, “You were my right arm.”

This time, thankfully, mercifully, there was no reply.

Prime stood at the edge of the nanomechanical ocean, and stared out over its mercurial waves. He would destroy this place, if he could. The voice of faith deep inside him screamed out against the thought. It would be genocide, it told him, the deaths of trillions of sentient machines. His rational mind him that he could trust nothing the insane Quintesson had said, and that maybe they were mindless machines that thought only to feed and reproduce.

Either way, he knew this place would burn, because it was an unholy obscenity in his mind… a mechanical hell… and he could not suffer to life in the same universe as the machines that had driven his brother to madness.

But deep down inside, he knew that what he really wanted was revenge. When Ultra Magnus died, a little piece of Prime's soul had died with him. And he knew, that if he ever was, he was no longer… perfect.